


Cartography

by ChocoChipBiscuit



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/F, flying femslash seniors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:13:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7685902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit/pseuds/ChocoChipBiscuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daisy is ready to fly again, and the Boomers have the only working plane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cartography

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://falloutkinkmeme.livejournal.com/7011.html?thread=19943779#t19943779) on the Fallout Kink Meme.

Love is a constant thing, something you carry with you wherever you go. Like a memento in your pocket, polish up the memories in odd moments, pick up bits and pieces to add to it. It is a never-ending craft, a found art of accidental joys and tangled stories, the patterns only emerging after days, weeks, months of reflection.

And Daisy has _years_ to draw on.

She was never happier than when flying her vertibird-- freedom in the skies, limited only by what she could carry. Seventy-one missions for the Devil’s Brigade was its own kind of heaven, watching the world soar away and placing landmarks on her mental map, a topography of memory and meaning more significant than any flat atlas, any attempt to compress the world’s glory to a mere two dimensions. Maps aren’t just where you’ve been, but where you want to go.

So at the Battle of the Dam, when the bomber flew overhead-- it targeted its way straight to her heart.

Love is the drop of your stomach during liftoff, the way the acceleration presses you into your seat. Love is the cold taste of clean air and the relentless, eye-smarting blue of the sky above clouds. Love is the joy of discovery and rediscovery, a thousand and one familiarities made new with exhilaration.

Love is also comfort in the familiarity, safety in the repetition of past journeys. When what _was_ has more meaning than what _is_ , when she sips cool lemon tea in the paltry shade of a plastic umbrella, sweet and sour washing away the painful reminder that really, scavving for rocket parts is a poor substitute for flying.

(Pieces of a hypergolic manifold assembly, tubes and coolant channels-- all as useless as lungs, liver, kidneys, cut out from the whole. She can no more fly with them than she could breathe with another’s lungs gleaming gray and glistening on the table.)

She tells Arcade her plan over dinner, a brahmin roast with gravy and green beans, a slab of cornbread to soak up the drippings and their cold beer leaving condensation rings on the wooden table.

He coughs, sputters. Barely enough sense to reach for a napkin before she slides it to him, since he’s a _doctor_ now and should know better than spraying aerosolized bacteria everywhere.

“But you’re--” And he hesitates, face sour as if sucking on a grapefruit rind. Glasses sliding down the tip of his nose, gravy spattered on his wrist. “Not a Boomer,” he finishes.

Good boy. Still some sense to him.

“Your Courier obviously made friends with them. And worse comes to worst, I’m still spry enough to run the gamut outside their base.”

“You could _die_.”

“I could have died at the Dam,” she points out. “I could have died on any of the missions I flew for Kreger. I could die right now, choking on my dinner.” Daisy softens her voice, raises her hand to tap her own wrist, mirroring Arcade’s gravy spots, then points at him. He wipes himself off as she continues. “I remember what it was like to _live_ too, Arcade.” She waits until he starts sipping his beer. “And if you’re that worried, you and your Courier should name a kid after me. Girl, preferably, but I’m not picky.”

Bingo. He coughs out a fine mist of beer and indignation, and recovers with pink-faced severity, cheeks burning brighter than the sunburn crisping his ears. 

“He is hardly the domestic type,” he says, somehow boyish despite the silver coming in amongst the blond fuzz coating his chin.

“And neither am I.” She smiles, ruthless as gin rummy. “So. Are you going to help me, or are you going to let me get blown up?”

. . .

Love is in the things you carry, the things that stitch themselves to your heart with iron thread.

So when Daisy packs for Nellis, she fills her bags with ruthless compassion.

She packs her pocket sewing kit, a small wooden box packed with the essentials: six needles glittering in a tiny red sponge, two spools of plain thread, and an assortment of buttons. No thimble, no seam-ripper, nothing fancy. It’s not much-- especially not compared to the larger kit Arcade gave her, now safely stowed in Ranger Andy’s care since _someone_ should get some use out of it-- but it’s what she’ll need for this trip she’s planned.

She packs old yellow-edged diagrams of jet engines and bombers, spidery black lines radiating from cutaway parts. Dog-eared flight manuals, pages starting to flake from the binding-- for vertibirds, hardly the same as planes, but better to bring it to those who might appreciate it than to let it die.

She packs tins of lemon tea, as much as she can buy from the 188 trading post. Breathes deep, lets the smell of lemon peel and hibiscus fill her lungs. Not just a luxury, but a comfort. She does not intend to drink alone, but hopes the tea will dissolve any tensions. Notoriously xenophobic as the Boomers are, she figures she’ll need every advantage.

And she wears her paper map beads, long strips of atlas rolled into ovals and strung onto pins. Each a reminder of where she’s flown, the lands she’s travelled and the ones she has yet to see. Wears them like peacock feathers beneath the plain brown of her traveling coat, her past and future fanned against her skin.

Battered rattan hat pressed flat over her head and shoulders square, she steps past the warning signs and into the no-man’s land that marks the edge of Boomer territory.

No shells whistling through the air, no death defined in graceful parabolics.

Good.

Daisy trudges through, small holes in the hat spattering light against her cheek, her chin. She wears certainty like a skin even as she licks salt from her upper lip, winces as she misses an uneven step and the shock jolts is way up through her hip. Passes old skeletons bleached by the sun, crumbled houses bombed beyond recognition. An incongruous, intact refrigerator in the middle of one such domicile.

No-man’s land. The Boomers may control it, but it belongs to ghosts.

The boy-- _man_ she corrects herself, because he carries his missile launcher with more ease and certainty than his peach-fuzz beard-- at the gate welcomes her in with a brisk nod. Asks for her identification, then summons an escort to take her to their leader.

Daisy follows, not bothering to hide her wide-eyed interest in the Boomers. Vault suits and military jackets, every one armed to the teeth, even the children. More Pip-Boys than she’s ever seen in one place, and more turrets, rifles, grenades, and other methods of ballistic death than even the Gun Runners could boast. Self-armament as the key to a peaceful society, taken to its logical and orderly extreme. Distant rows of crops and solar panels glinting beneath the noon sky. Self-sufficient in almost every sense, as long as they have the powder and ammo to make it last.

All the things the Enclave could have been, if they’d stayed more focused on survival than manifest destiny.

She mounts the steps to their leader’s quarters, lingers in the doorway as her eyes adjust to the cool darkness within. The Boomer leader is a wiry woman, shrunken but not frail. Hair gone pure white, silver in the shadows. Eyes a sharp and piercing green, like a broken scotch bottle. She dominates the room, draws the eye before anything else.

They meet each other’s gaze square on. Two doyennes acknowledging one another.

Daisy sets her pack on the floor and takes a seat across from the Boomer woman, leans forward with her ankles crossed. “Hello. Pearl, I presume? I’m Daisy, and my boy’s told me a bit about that magnificent Lady of yours.” 

“You presume right,” Pearl says agreeably. “Not that he told me much about you, other than the usual mush-mouthing about to please treat you nicely, hold fire, et cetera, et cetera.”

Daisy laughs, light and sweet as the evening breeze. Pulls out her tin of lemon tea, sets it on the small table next to a chipped vase with fresh flowers, summer-sweetness floating in the air. “A gift, in exchange for your time.”

“Time is precious these days,” Pearl says with a smile, teeth white as shells. “Your boy’s said you’ve flown before?”

Daisy nods, something like military posture setting rods down her spine, pistons through her shoulders. Old habits die hard, despite the years that bury them all. “Vertibirds, mainly. Nothing like a plane, but I’m adaptable. Brought some diagrams and manuals as well. If anyone can make use of them, it’s the only people who’ve got a working aircraft to begin with.”

Pearl sighs, crinkles her brow. Wrinkles creasing roadmaps across her face. “It is just the one, unfortunately. Most of our pilots train through simulators, and fuel is precious.”

Virtual reality is closer than dreams or scavving. Daisy shrugs, downplays the way her heart rattles her ribs. The tin-taste of high skies whispering promises down her throat. “Still better than my other options.” Smiles, tongue pressed against her teeth. “I know I came out of nowhere, but this can be mutually beneficial. Isolation only works so long.” Hard-fought Enclave lessons, empty metal suits and the absent echoes of the Brotherhood.

“And what do you have to offer?” Pearl asks, mild as milk. No challenge in those teeth, but that's not the same as softness. Daisy’s gaze drifts upwards, behind her, on the wall-- a dizzyingly intricate design of blue and white threads, string art set in whorls that bring to mind cool skies and soft clouds. Tiny plastic planes dangling at key points, a reminder of a greater whole.

“You have maps, but I have places.” Touches her fingers to the front of her shirt, the beads pressing inked terrain against her heart. Topography and contours, the metaphor and rhetoric of maps. “I know people.” Could slice out pieces of the world as neat as orange segments, leave them dripping on the table for Pearl’s inspection. Sweet pulp to nourish the soul. “And I was a vertibird pilot-- keep saying it’s not the same as a plane, but it trains different ways of thinking. More three-dimensional, less linear.” Holding patterns of thought.

Pearl chuckles, a wheezing snort at the end of a laugh like honey-coated gravel. “Well. Welcome aboard.” Reaches out with a hand, her grip bony but strong. Thin ridges of knuckle and paper-thin skin, the veins like faded ink beneath the surface.

Daisy takes her hand, shaking with a firm grip. Something new, then.

Small talk, inconsequential conversations as Pearl heats water and Daisy readies the tea. They let it steep, clink their cups together and take the first sip at the same time.

Pearl’s foot bumps Daisy’s under the table, and Pearl laughs, but Daisy smiles. Pearl’s spoon chimes against the cup as she stirs in a trickle of agave nectar, but Daisy lets the moment sit on her tongue, puckered and promising. Like lemon peel and hibiscus.


End file.
